Generate a Word Document from a SharePoint list using Power Automate

okay i'm going to show you how to generate a word document using power automate so it means that the data from a sharepoint list or from anything really we could even have data in excel can be generated can be inserted in in word automatically so what do we need to do that we need a sharepoint list of course that's for my example we will need one with column name metadata so maybe uh address name etc then we need a word document where we can move this data it's called fields in in word and then we need a power automate of course so that we can read the data in sharepoint and place it into words okay so let's get crack on so i'm going to use the simple template called new i'm going to do a list actually and now we have template which is pretty cool because one of them is i'm going to take the example of a event itinerary so it looks like this i just use the template and i go ahead and create it with data here we go so i have created my even titan array and if i'm going to use it for event but for training sessions so i've just added one column for participants have a bit of code etc code for like session code so i know how long my participants are when my participant are going to come to the training so what i would like is to have a word document now to invite them to let them know about the training is confirmed and the address maybe so let's switch to word going to find also a template oh not the party that's a bit too much isn't it so let's go to the next one event name create so this document comes with few things i'm going to say training is soon and within all the placeholder i'm going to delete for now and i want to tell the name of the person so i want to make it personalized so here i'm going to add this thing in the developer toolbar so developer toolbar needs to be added it's there's a setting in files to to display this once we're in developer toolbar it allows us to just say there and then i'm going to put a text field here so it's called a content content control so i just add the text field so i'm going to say there mister your training sessions for d and then here we have a date as well right so here i'm going to say training start which is the date and the time of the training start i select it and i do content control because the previous one i didn't so i forgot to actually add the name of this content control which is very annoying because now i need to go into the properties and give it a name again or even better i can just delete it and then i just select attendee i type attendees select it add a content control text here we go so let's say your training control for d start until training and and then i would just say is confirmed just to make it short so here i just add text control so we don't use the other ones we don't really use anything like this because the text the type of the field is going to be done in power automatic so there's no problem is confirmed so i have a few more things then maybe i'm going to tell them a as a reminder let's play here over there i'm gonna remove this placeholder remove all this and just say reminder of the course and the reminder of the course is also let's say course outline select this and again text took control so it means that all this control have now the name that they have as a as a control as a field so i can then use it in my power automate next step of course i'm going to save this uh word so i do file and then you save it on sharepoint right so i'm going to save as i see on my recent i already have document and let's put it inside the general so they can even be used in in teams and this one is my training invitation confirmation okay so we have our document in sharepoint if i go to general i have my file here training confirmation so all i need is to now go into my my power automate and create an automation which may be automatic because every time i'm going to add a new event in the list then it would generate the document so i can do that from automated or i can go to my list even internally and i will do look automate and then create a rule but from that i will just say oops not this one i will just say uh okay they're trying to be very clever here so when a new is being created then i don't want to send an email that's very annoying isn't it trying to tell us what to do so what i want is a brand new automation so i'm going to manage my rule and have a brand new one so let's go and do it in power automate directly so we automate the cloud so i'm going to say send not send generate word document on new item in the event list so new item is usually an item in the list in sharepoint so if i do when an item is created and i click next or create and just select the site site is my dev site we have a list inside which is called event here we go even dictionary so when a new item is created in this list i want to now automatically i want to start talking to word so let's try to see if word has something and we can see word online there are other things by the way and i sometimes talk about third party as well so what we can do here is that we can populate so we don't want to yet put it as pdf because it doesn't exist we want to populate a word template and yes there may be premium licenses implication as well so from that where is my template we know that it's in dev as well so where's my dev can i type them here it's in the library the main one which is shared document or document here we go and we have it inside a library so we have it inside general and then we can select training confirmation you just found one word document here so it's even easier now this is the magic happen it just pulled all my fields from the word document the one i created earlier brilliant because now attendee i can place a value for my attendee and my the value of attendee is in the list so it's in the list when i'm getting a new item new item has been created so attendee i call it participant training start i called it um it was automatic in my list in the template so it was called start then we have the training end let's do a search and date and the outline it was a little bit different in my case i think i used i use session description i used here we go okay let's have a look at this if i save it already it's going to generate my word document but the small issue here is that the word document will be generated but it's not actually going to exist as a file and that's quite an important item so the next one is to save the file to save the file i'm going to use a new operation sharepoint file and i have my create file around here create file sharepoint so again where is my source so it's my dev site where am i going to create the files so that's a little bit different from the previous one because the first one here we are using a word document a word template so this one training confirmation is my template whereas the new one created will be the file where i have file for each participant a word document for each participant so the location i will put it similarly anyway into my document so we have this here shared document then we were using general so let's just using here but um yeah that's fine i'm just going to go one step back click general and this one we have to make sure that the new word document is not going to have the same name of where it's not going to work so this one is a new or let's say a session invite confirmation and then let's give the name of the person so that the file will be unique so the person is called participant here we go and i'm going to say that it's a docx so now is the how do we transfer from this file the template has populated a new word document we need to move all the binary of this file inside a proper file so we just have to select here it's to populate and we select microsoft word so let's start testing this already and that would be a good start for most of you who wants to create and generate word document so i'm back on my event itinerary and let's just do a copy because if we do a copy then it will be understood as just a new item and my workflow my power automate is starting on a new item so i just copy everything here and what i will change is let's go one step back is uh superman user because that's my user to make sure that i uh locate him and if i click outside it's starting to save if it saves then it kicks the power automate straight

Channel: DigitalFrancois - (François tells Tech)

Views: 33,008

Keywords: productivity, how-to, power automate, power automate tutorial, sharepoint document generation, word SharePoint

Id: JEZlrrfEe2s

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021